She nodded. ‘I don’t think he was keen. He’s a fair-weather countryman, my Phil. He likes it when the sun shines and it looks like one of his picture postcards. But days like today, cold, damp, a touch of freezing fog in the air, he’s either sitting on top of the stove or else he’s locked in his darkroom with a pair of paraffin heaters. I’ll say this for him, though. Today, he made an exception.’
‘If you like, we can wait till he comes back,’ George said.
‘That won’t alter what you’ve got to say, will it?’ she said, her voice weary.
‘No, I’m afraid not.’ George opened his overcoat and removed two polythene bags from the inside poacher’s pocket. One contained the soft, fluffy ball of material snagged on the broken twig; the other, the smooth, ridged toggle, its natural shades of brown and bone strange against the man-made plastic. Attached to it by strong navy thread was a fragment of navy-blue felted wool. ‘I have to ask you, do you recognize either of these?’
Her face was blank as she reached for the bags. She stared at them for a long moment. ‘What’s this supposed to be?’ she asked, prodding the material with her index finger.
‘We think it’s wool,’ George said. ‘Perhaps from tights like Alison was wearing.’
‘This could be anything,’ she said defensively. ‘It could have been out there for days, weeks.’
‘We’ll have to see what our lab can make of it.’ No point in trying to force her to accept what her mind did not want to admit. ‘What about the toggle? Do you recognize that?’
She picked up the bag and ran her finger over the carved piece of antler. She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. ‘Is this all you found of her? Is this all there is to show?’
‘We found signs of a struggle in the spinney.’ George pointed in what he thought was the right direction. ‘Between the house and the wood where we found Shep, down towards the back of the dale. It’s dark now, so there’s a limit to what we can achieve, but first thing in the morning, my men will carry out a fingertip search of the whole spinney, to see if we can find any more traces of Alison.’
‘But that’s all you found?’ Now there was eagerness in her face.
He hated to dash her hopes, but he couldn’t lie. ‘We also found some hairs and a little blood. As if she’d hit her head on a tree.’ Ruth clapped her hand to her open mouth, suppressing a cry. ‘It really was very little blood, Mrs Hawkin. Nothing to indicate anything but a very minor injury, I promise you.’
Her wide eyes stared at him, her fingers digging into her cheek as if physically holding her mouth closed could somehow contain her response. He didn’t know what to do, what to say. He had so little experience of people’s responses to tragedy and crisis. He’d always had senior officers or colleagues with more experience to blunt the acuteness of other people’s pain. Now he was on his own, and he knew he would measure himself for ever according to how he dealt with this stricken woman.
George leaned across the table and covered Ruth Hawkin’s free hand with his own. ‘I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t grounds for concern,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing to indicate that Alison has come to any serious harm. Quite the opposite, really. And there is one thing that we can be sure of now. Alison hasn’t run away of her own accord. Now, I know that probably doesn’t seem like much of a consolation to you right now, but it means that we won’t be frittering away our resources on things that are a waste of time. We know that Alison didn’t go off on her own and catch a bus or a train, so we won’t be devoting officers to checking out bus and railway stations. We’ll be using every officer we have to follow lines of inquiry that could actually lead us somewhere.’
Ruth Hawkin’s hand fell away from her mouth. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’
George gripped her hand. ‘There’s no reason to think so,’ he said.
‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked. ‘I ran out a while back.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘I should have sent yon WPC up to the shop at Longnor for me. That would have been useful.’
Once they were both smoking, he took back the plastic bags and pushed the cigarettes across in their place. ‘You keep these. I’ve more in the car.’
‘Thanks.’ The tightness in her face slackened momentarily and George saw for the first time the same smile that made Alison’s photograph so remarkable.
He let enough time pass for them both to gain some benefit from the nicotine. ‘I need some help, Mrs Hawkin,’ George said. ‘Last night, we had to work against the clock to try and find traces of Alison. And today, we’ve been searching. All the mechanical, routine things that are often successful, that we have to do. But I’ve not had a proper chance to sit down and talk to you about what kind of girl Alison was. If someone has taken her – and I won’t lie to you, that is looking increasingly likely – I need to know everything I can about Alison so that I can work out where the point of contact is between Alison and this person. So I need you to tell me about your daughter.’
Ruth sighed. ‘She’s a lovely lass. Bright as a button, always has been. Her teachers all say she could go to college if she sticks in at her books. University even.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘You’ll have been to university.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Yes. I studied law at Manchester.’
She nodded. ‘You’ll know what it’s like then, studying. She never has to be told to do her homework, you know, not like Derek and Janet. I think she actually likes schoolwork, though she’d cut her tongue out soon as admit it. God knows where that comes from. Neither me nor her dad were ones for school. Couldn’t get out soon enough. She’s not a swot, mind you. She likes her fun an’ all, does our Alison.’
‘What does she do for fun?’ George probed gently.
‘They’re all daft about that pop music, her and Janet and Derek. The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, all that lot. Charlie too, though he’s not got the time to be sitting round every night listening to records. But he goes to the dances at the Pavilion Gardens, and he’s always telling Alison what records she should get next. She’s got more records than the shop, I’m always telling her. You’d need more than two ears to listen to that lot. Phil buys them for her. He goes into Buxton every week and chooses a selection from the hit parade as well as the ones Charlie tells her about…’ Her voice tailed off.
‘What else does she do?’
‘Sometimes Charlie takes them into Buxton to the roller-skating on a Wednesday night.’ Her breath caught in her throat. ‘Oh God, I wish he’d been taking them last night,’ she cried, sudden realization felling her. Her head dropped and she drew so hard on her cigarette that George could hear the tobacco crackle. When she looked up, her eyes brimmed with tears and held an appeal that cut directly through his professional defences to his heart. ‘Find her, please,’ she croaked.
He pressed his lips together and nodded. ‘Believe me, Mrs Hawkin, I intend to do just that.’
‘Even if it’s only to bury her.’
‘I hope it won’t come to that,’ he said.
‘Aye. You and me both.’ She exhaled a narrow stream of smoke. ‘You and me both.’
He
